Journey
by ravenmoore0123456789
Summary: What is hell? Let's take a journey and find out.


**Experience**

Many religions depict hell as a bright, fiery wasteland filled to teeming with craggily rocks and demons flittering about like mutated fairies. Those same religions depict a river running red with the blood of the innocents twisting and turning as far as the eye can see. Those same believers also argue that the very air is filled with the screeching of the eternally damned, that the air is so poisonous it chokes every unfortunate inhabitant.

But what if I said that wasn't true?

I wish to reveal to you the truth of fabled horrors, so that those above who still have a chance may not have to suffer as I do.

Slowly I became aware of a faint sound. It was kin an old recording of another recording of a faint conversation, although, throughout the years it had since been distorted into a jumbled mass of withering static and something distinctly inhuman. And as I listened harder, trying to make out what was being said, the noise grew louder and louder! Until it became nearly deafening in its intensity.

And then it just stopped, as if it had never played in the first place.

Soon after a voice, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere, rasped drily, "No escape."

Then the voice disappeared, and I was left lying wherever I was, alone. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too heavy, so there I lay listening for any new sounds. To the howling screams and the moans of pain and my belly filled with a terrible anguish. I would not believe it.

Not until I had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, I couldn't. I soon learn to regret that conviction.

I was unaware if time passed. The shrieking never completely ceased, it only rose and lowered in volumes between ear shattering and deafening to ghostly whispers that would send chills down your spine.

But soon I opened my eyes to an unnerving sight. It was similar to a void, no walls, no ceiling, no floor, and I was utterly alone. Like a never-ending abyss.

before long I saw a smudge of grayish-white approaching my prone form. At first there was just one and it looked to be miles off, but soon more began to appear. First one, then two, then four, and so on they came. Soon there were hundreds if not thousands coming towards me.

I was excited, I thought, 'finally, someone will help me,' but as they drew near enough in view I became horrified.

They were like ghast figures one would see in an illustration of an artist's nightmares. The creatures, for they were not people, at least, they no longer resembled people, had little to no hair, it came out in strands and small clump…

Sort of like boar bristles in an assortment of colors and shades. The colors ranged from the palest white to the blackest void. The were even a few rainbow-like ones; bloody reds marred in deep rusty browns, sickly shades of green highlighted with infectious yellows.

Truly they resembled the types of monsters' features fearful children would imagine in the dark lurking under beds and in closets.

Those things shambled by like skeletons, some were wrapped in their skin so tightly their bones creaked and groaned, and others looked as if they were melting right off, leaving nothing but grinning skulls to shine through the muck. The skin of these things looked as if they were in the processes of decomposing and being mummified at the same time.

If I wasn't horrified I might have found it fascinating.

Feeling within my extremities returned slowly just as the last of the strange dripping husks passed. I stood and followed, not knowing what else to do, but also not wanting to be left alone again.

I followed for a long time, but the more I moved the more I felt the surrounding environment. It was hot. As the raging plasma storms of the sun, but there was no source for this heat. No light, just pain. Where ever the unbearable heat touched was burnt, burnt beyond all recognition. While some parts of my body now blackened others were liquidized and I could feel the flesh dripping. No amount of time could ever heal such blistered flesh and as I blistered more the more I became aware of my parched throat, I quickly became desperate for even a few drops to fall from wherever they may.

And with that thought in mind, the horrid heat retreated, and a moment of respite was given.

That moment of rest was not to last, however, because what came next was worse. The winds picked up and they howled like the demented thoughts of the deranged, and with that wind came a chill from three million years ago. When I breathed (for I could not see any of the husks doing so) it condensed and fell to the ground as ice. My body shivered so fiercely I feared I would shake apart then and there. While I shook the husks continued to move steadily, as if the cold wilds had no effect. I feared I wouldn't be able to keep up with the group I now felt compelled to continue to follow, even if I was last in line.

My weakened body began to burn with a different fire, the fire of something so cold it could have rivaled a thousand knives cutting the same place over and over again, my body was still suffering from the burns of the blistering fires from before. Some of the parts that were blackened and drip, drip, dripping froze in place like fetid tears of my body. Never to fall.

The creatures just stopped moving out of nowhere and lined up neatly, perfectly, not knowing what else to do, I too, lined up with them.

I looked to front and saw a hulking shadow that had a radiant light shining from its back. The light soon faded little by little until I could make out a face.

Oh, what a face it was.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, bar none. His eyes were the brightest blue, like the summer sky of one's childhood, but there seemed to be something dark, lurking and hiding within that shadow of his beautiful light.

There was a sickly-sweet scent gently wafting from his podium. He looked out and upon scanning the crowd, locked his eye unto me and gestured for me to come fore, and I followed that command. As I stood before him he stared down at me with kind eyes and a cruel smile and asked,

"Do you know where you are, my child?"

and I answered him in supplication, "Please have mercy."

The being ushered me to the side and bide me look into his mirror, but I felt my apprehension for this man growing and now for his mirror. I looked at him to try and beg, but he only pushed harder. I could no longer move and so I, at last, looked.

And what I saw was the truth.

I was once an average person, but endless trials of my journey had taken their pounds of flesh, literally in my case as it were. I now resembled one of those putrid, dripping husks I walked with.

I knew where I was, and I knew this place.

I turned and looked to the giant as he asked,

Where are you?"

And from the depths of my fetid corpse I spoke the last world everyone here has uttered,

"This is hell, and this is where I belong."


End file.
